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As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends. It started a few years ago when sports betting was legalized in my home state and when I was at

• giancarlostoro 3y ago
  I rarely go to Casinos, but usually go in with $20, if I lose it, that's basically it for me. I can't imagine justifying throwing more money after losing it all, only in video games where gambling is allowed.
  • 3a2d29 3y ago
    The key (and way easier said then done) is to take a small amount of money out, accept that its likely all going to be gone, and try to milk it slowly so all the free drinks you get are worth the money. I like in NYC, so achieving the typical cost of drinks is not hard.
    • giancarlostoro 3y ago
      Not a bad tip! I will keep that in mind.
  • blowski 3y ago
    It's best to think of it as spending $20 on entertainment.
    • mason55 3y ago
      Right. There are lots of things I’ll spend $100 on an entertainment expense for a night out. And plenty of things that people think is worth $100 for entertainment that I don’t find to be worth it. And the house edge at a casino isn’t THAT bad. Eg if you’re playing blackjack at $20/hand, a house edge of 1% means you can play 500 hands for your $100.
  • underseacables 3y ago
    I had a professor once say that when the lottery gets really big, at that point, it's not gambling, it's an investment. But keep it small. It's interesting the types of people who can walk into a casino like you and I and say OK, $20, that's all I'm spending. We lose that and we say good night. Other people… They say no, I can win this, and so they go and spend another $20. That decision point - to continue or withdraw - is utterly fascinating.
    • neilk 3y ago
      Out of curiosity I once went into a very small-time casino. I ended up at a blackjack table with various characters, one of whom was a single mom. She said she was playing to get money to buy the kids Easter chocolate. She was quite experienced and was up a few hundred dollars for a while. And she said that was it, she was leaving. And then she didn’t. And then lost it all. And then gained some back. And lost that too. By the time I’d slowly bled away my $20 and gave up, she was still there.
    • swozey 3y ago
      Hell I go in with $20 just to get the free drinks and sit there bored out of my mind hitting some stupid button that occasionally gives me another round of drinks or not. I am so sick of Vegas and will never go to another conference there.
    • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      > I had a professor once say that when the lottery gets really big, at that point, it's not gambling, it's an investment. But keep it small. This seems like funny logic. My local provincial lottery can range from $5 to $50 million. If I were to accept that I could possibly win, anything in that range is a ridiculous sum of money for me - easily more than I am likely to make for the remainder of my career. I know I won't win if I play, but if I thought I might I can't figure out why $5M is gambling, but $50M would be an investment. Either way, it's absolutely life changing "quit my job tomorrow" money.
      • ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
  • interludead 3y ago
    It's a good strategy but I think it's quite hard to notice that gambling is becoming addictive and a problem
  • Scoundreller 3y ago
    I used to do this in Niagara Falls, but that would be enough to get you free parking. Now they cut back on that, I park elsewhere and they don’t even get a chance at my $20 on red anymore.
    • giancarlostoro 3y ago
      If you ever go on a cruise, the ones with a casino typically give you about $10 of free in-casino credit.
• pc86 3y ago
  Is it still ok to say that men take more risks than women in general? Gambling is a risk, so on its face it makes sense that men would gamble more on average. It is fun though, the casinos especially have gotten very good at making it entertaining. Unless you have an addiction to it there's no inherent difference between spending a $50 on a night out with your friends of losing the same amount at the casino.
  • lm28469 3y ago
    > Is it still ok to say that men take more risks than women in general? Unless you're so woke that you think testosterone is a social construct, yes it's still very ok https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653580/#:~:text=(2008)%20found%20that%20endogenous%20testosterone,women%2C%20but%20not%20in%20men https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653580/#:~:tex.... https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0907352106 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0907352106
    • baron816 3y ago
      This is legit. A lot of people want to treat men and women as having no biological differences. But the distribution of men’s risk tolerance is shifted well to the right of women’s. And it means that more men end up as entrepreneurs than women, but also in jail, addicted to drugs and gambling, dead in an accident, etc.
    • impomura 3y ago
      the second link you pasted is a study made by economists, not real scientists, strike that. The first one you really didn't read, did you? "In contrast to received wisdom regarding testosterone and risk, the present data provide the first robust evidence for a nonlinear association between economic preferences and levels of endogenous testosterone." "Despite the common view that high testosterone levels lead to risky decisions across numerous domains, we found that testosterone has a quadratic relationship with economic risk preferences: Individuals with low and high levels of testosterone (within their gender) were risk and ambiguity neutral, whereas individuals with intermediate levels of testosterone were risk and ambiguity averse."
• l1nuxn3wb 3y ago
  [dead]
• interludead 3y ago
  > It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it's such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended. This what scares me the most in that trend
  • amelius 3y ago
    Gambling should be treated like drugs. Nothing good comes from it. It only increases the wealth gap.
    • aaomidi 3y ago
      Legal & regulated drugs generally don’t cause as much damage as legal & regulated gambling.
      • Rinzler89 3y ago
        Gambling mostly damages just the person gambling (and loosing) while drugs tend to damage not just the consumer but also people and the environment around them (violence, crime, homelessness, mental issues, robberies, feces and syringes everywhere, harassment etc).
        • aaomidi 3y ago
          We’ve never really had legal and regulated drug use other than mostly coffee and alcohol. The same illegal drugs used by the lower echelons of society is the same as the ones used in higher echelons of society. You’d be hard pressed to find folks not using hard drugs in the Fortune 500 list. The difference is the availability of drugs. Many rich people never struggle to find high quality drugs. That is not the same for everyone.
          • Rinzler89 3y ago
            >You’d be hard pressed to find folks not using hard drugs in the Fortune 500 list. Oh for sure, the big difference is that rich people can afford to go into the best private rehab whenever they cross the line, whereas working class people tend to end up broke, homeless and sick.
• corytheboyd 3y ago
  This does not sound like a real gambling addiction, it sounds like a group of friends who enjoy the occasional small thrill and doing something together. Losing a few hundred dollars every now and then is fine, even if you personally find it morally unacceptable. A gambling problem is taking your entire paycheck to the casino, taking out a loan, selling a car… Borrowing $40 is so far from being problematic, sounds like a group of people who trusts each other to occasionally borrow and pay each other back, and for things other than gambling too. And seriously, all this over $40? I don’t really get skiing, it’s a very expensive and dangerous activity to me, yet to others it’s a whole lifestyle. Fine by me, put knives on your feet and fall down a hill. Life is short, find your dumb thrills, it’s fine. You don’t need to gamble yourself, that’s not the point, just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.
  • mycologos 3y ago
    Yes, skiing and gambling are very similar, that's why there are all those hotlines you can call for help quitting skiing
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • gruez 3y ago
      The parent poster isn't claiming that skiing and gambling are "very similar" in general, just that in the particular example given where they only loosing a few hundred bucks is pretty close to a mildly expensive hobby, like skiing.
      • deleted 3y ago
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    • deleted 3y ago
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    • anshumankmr 3y ago
      Thrill seeking can be an addiction, but whether its bad is debatable. I have that tendency myself.
• chrsig 3y ago
  Anticipation is a hell of a drug. You'd think they'd start improving their technique though.
  • maerF0x0 3y ago
    Lots of people talking about dopamine as the reward "drug" but few seem to understand that the very anticipation of a thing releases dopamine. You get some dopamine just thinking about opening a tab to that site, not just from following through on it. The anticipation of the next good video/pic/post can be what keeps you scrolling/browsing.
• Verdex 3y ago
  There was an old Casino parody film from the mid 90s (iirc Mafia!). Anyway, they had a scene where they were showing the different games that were being played in the casino. Things like a bunch of Saudi princes playing an extremely high stakes game of Candyland, etc. One of the games was called the black hole or something like that. Anyway, people would step up to the table and the guy working the table would just sweep up their money into a hole and tell them they lost. It had a constant stream of people walking up to the table to lose money. It's more or less the mental model that I use for gambling.
  • Rinzler89 3y ago
    >There was an old Casino parody film from the mid 90s (iirc Mafia!). IIRC Mafia! was a parody of the Godfather series, or the mobster movies of the 70s-80s in general.
    • JamesLeonis 3y ago
      That is correct for the first half, but the Vegas scenes where he is "observing the floor" and showing the games, including the Black Hole, are parodying Casino scenes specifically.
  • n4r9 3y ago
    > It's more or less the mental model that I use for gambling. Let me tell you a story. Fifteen years ago, a person named n4r9 made £10 at the blackjack table. They turned around, left the casino, and never returned. Now they're making 25 times that amount every day they step into the office. And do you know who that person was?
    • _aavaa_ 3y ago
      Albert Einstein?
      • anal_reactor 3y ago
        It's a Me! Mario!
• mycologos 3y ago
  In my limited experience as somebody whose friends and family are all pretty well educated and pretty well off (for better or for worse, I work at a big tech company), gambling seems pretty class-specific. I don't know anybody who gambles, on betting or crypto, and only a small number who even pick individual stocks. Some people play poker, but only for nominal sums, and it's usually presented as more of an intellectual exercise. I get the sense that if somebody said they like sports betting, it would produce a half-second awkward glitch in a conversation. I doubt anybody would moralize, but there might be an unspoken question like "[you gamble? don't you have more fulfilling things to do?]" The simple answer here is probably that if you already have enough money then you don't need to gamble, but it's not like most people who gamble actually believe it's the path to profit, it seems like there's something else here where gambling is viewed as low-status (in my bubble).
  • manthedudeguy 3y ago
    [dead]
  • HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    There are extremely wealthy people out there gambling on horse races.
    • SJC_Hacker 3y ago
      That's mostly about pride in their own abilities to "pick the right horse" than to any genuine desire or expectation they will make money. Either that, or its because the race was fixed.+
  • psunavy03 3y ago
    Investing in stocks != gambling. The market is not a casino.
    • HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
      Who's doing to tell 'em?
• phkahler 3y ago
  >> As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends. I see this among a fair number of engineers in their 30s, 40s, and one pushing 50. I don't think many of the older crowd are doing it, but maybe they just don't talk about it. I have no idea how well they do, but I'm sure they lose on average. Bets are often in the hundreds of dollars if I'm hearing them correctly.
  • foobarian 3y ago
    The sneaky thing about gambling at casinos and other professional outfits is that the career total of any given gambler is a random walk that can easily end up quite positive with significant probability (e.g. say around 50-50), so if you poll your friends you may well find people who are ahead, which is really great marketing. The house advantage is that of course these "around 50-50" odds are in the house's favor, and thanks to large numbers of visitors they can remove the variance and profit reliably.
    • SJC_Hacker 3y ago
      Compulsive gamblers have a tendency to not be honest about only counting their big wins and discounting their losses.
      • jpsouth 3y ago
        A guy from my old local pub was always very keen to tell us about the couple thousand pound payouts, while also being very keen on asking others to buy him a pint or four because he had no money.
• danans 3y ago
  > It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it's such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended. That's why this is called gambling _addiction_. If you understand the existence of other behavioral addictions, it's not so different.
• HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  There was a post yesterday on /r/smallbusiness about helping an employee who had a heroin addiction and helping one who had a gambling addiction. The overwhelming consensus was that the gambling addiction was worse, which is not what I would have expected. But the logic made sense from the financial perspective: you can only use so much heroin in a day, but you can spend an unlimited amount on gambling.
  • imzadi 3y ago
    I feel like this is backwards? When you reach your heroine limit, you die. It's pretty final. And, most people don't have unlimited money with which to gamble.
  • realce 3y ago
    Every time you use heroin, it works. Gambling works maybe 1/10 times.
    • j45 3y ago
      Not really, addictions usually need higher quantities and frequency.
  • j45 3y ago
    Another thing with gambling is the drug (cash) is always around you and in your hands. Easy to lose value for it.
  • Jerrrry 3y ago
    A dizzy, barely uncomfortable bed-ridden weekend and a strip of Orange paper, vs. A lifelong proclivity to quantize, metrify, and reduce all social interactions to transactional objects that exist soley to be leveraged. The latter also happens to drug addicts, but the it is a psychological phenomenon that can be stymied with medication. Unfortunately, no analogous chemical exists (yet!) for the similarly inflected urge to gamble.
• throw18376 3y ago
  there's two types of gambling addiction. sports betting, table games, etc: gambler motivated by excitement, somehow thinks they are going to win and make money. often racks up massive losses due to desire to "win it all back" as you say. this is stereotypically the "male" style of gambling addiction. like your friends. slot machines, video poker: the psychology is very different. the heaviest slot machine players don't have any expectation that they are going to come out ahead. they play the game partly because it puts them into a soothing flow state (though in many cases it is just compulsive behavior with no good motivation). losing money overtime is understood as the cost of playing. slot machine gambling is stereotypically associated with women. you wouldn't see this either because it's a more solitary activity (unlike table games/sports betting) but it can be very dark -- I think probably worse than the classic gambling addiction. i think the gender distinctions are real although obviously it's not hard and fast (plenty of male slot machine players, plenty of women losing money placing bets). i think it's probably partly brain differences and partly who casinos/bookies vs. video slot companies choose to market to.
• japhyr 3y ago
  Last month I went to Vegas for the first time in years. I only ever go as a way to get out into the desert - Death Valley most often, this time Zion and Bryce Canyon. I spent a couple nights in Vegas because my 13yo was interested in seeing it. I watched what was happening in the casinos, and wondered if I was missing something. I read a bit about craps, because I didn't really understand the bets people were making. Reading gambling forums is just depressing. Many people understand it's just luck and are doing it for fun, but there are so many people who think that you can get "good" at rolling dice. People talk about winning big on a roll and then "reinvesting" their winnings at the table. Legalized gambling is just a giant machine for separating people of all classes from whatever money they have.
  • throw0101b 3y ago
    > I spent a couple nights in Vegas because my 13yo was interested in seeing it. I watched what was happening in the casinos, and wondered if I was missing something. You were missing the dopamine hits. The highs and lows and 'drama' and 'excitement' of winning (and losing) is what people tend to go for. That's why it can become an addiction: wanting another hit. * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-brain-gets-addicted-to-gambling/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-brain-get... * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845016/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845016/
  • nunez 3y ago
    I hate going to Vegas, but it can be fun without hitting the casinos. They have some of the best restaurants and music venues in the world, and Las Vegas the city has interesting things to do too.
• Projectiboga 3y ago
  I majored in statistics undergraduate and being able to derive and prove the gamblers ruin problem is one of the requirements. At 50/50 it's your money over your plus house's money. And it gets drastically worse as soon as the house gets even a slight edge. I wasn't the casino's target anyways as I saw it was a waste of time and I loathe all the time wasted walking past the gaming area to even see music at a done here like a Hard Rock. Edit, my school is the top link when I searched for a reference, I guess they included it after the casinos went into Atlantic City. Generalized Gambler's Ruin Problem - Rutgers Math https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/EM20/GamblersRuin.pdf https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/EM20/GamblersRuin.p...
• deleted 3y ago
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• brigadier132 3y ago
  Gambling is an addiction. Having been there, in the moment you don't have control. I would consciously repeat to myself that I wouldn't buy weekly options and repeat in my mind all the reasons why it was just guaranteed to lose me money and how it did not benefit me. A few hours later I would get a random impulse and do it anyway almost without conscious thought. It turned out I had crippling ADHD and after starting to take vyvanse I just completely stopped gambling overnight, (along with binge eating and drinking).
• Tiktaalik 3y ago
  The women you may know may still gamble but escape notice because they're doing it differently. Lots of my women friends do various scratch and win tickets and joke around that winning is the only way they're going to be able to retire. At the core of it both groups clearly feel that the economy is so broken that it's no longer to achieve the outcomes they want through normal means and only some short cut of luck will get them there.
  • ravenstine 3y ago
    These people aren't entirely wrong, but at the same time a scant number of them (in my personal experience) bother doing something boring like investing their money in a taxable account or IRA. In a peak act of irony, they dismiss the stock market as "gambling." They'll give bits of money away in a piecemeal attempt at random chance but dismiss participating in a market that has a far, far greater level of predictability than lottery tickets. It doesn't matter that the barrier to entry has been lowered to near-zero. It doesn't matter that a person can invest in a single ETF so they can set it and forget it. They won't do it. So while the economic situation has become more challenging for a lot of people, if all people are doing is trusting their 401k and otherwise throwing their money at random chance, then I really don't want to hear them complain.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• Archelaos 3y ago
  > _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800. Explain to them that they not have just lost an avarage $600 of their live-time earnings, but over $70,000, if they had invested the money in the stock market for retirement. If we assume that the avarage S&P 500 return with dividends reinvested is somewhat above 10%, as it was in the past, investing $600 now would yield them over $70,000 for their retirement in 50 years. The real value must be adjusted somewhat due to taxes and inflation. But in addition, investing in the stock market provides one with some sort of an inflation insurance for free. [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/average-stock-market-return/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/average-stock-marke...